Is English basically a creole?

No.

I'm not gonna tell you there are no reputable linguists who take the idea seriously, but they're in the minority.

It absorbed a lot of foreign (esp Norman French) vocabulary, and shed many of its inflections *in part* (but not completely) due to heavy contact with other languages, not just French but Scandinavian and Brythonic, but that doesn't make it a creole.

Being heavily influenced by other languages doesn't make a language a creole. Calling something a creole is a technical claim about the language's genetic history, i.e. that it started as a pidgin invented by people with no common language between them, and was then learned natively by children, developing a much richer (and more defined) grammar and lexicon in the process.

There's really no good evidence that English was a pidgin at any point.

I doubt that, but even if it is true, English's grammar, syntax, and phonology still got FRANK'd.

That's a false meme and you know it
Easily 50% of the words that give the sense (adjectives/nouns/verbs) in common English sentences are of French origin
Percentages are flawed by the fact any sentence is also full of useless structure words (the, to, at, of...etc) that are always Germanic

Of course if you're an uneducated fag who think that French originated words = rendez-vous, hors-doeuvre...etc, you'll think they're very rare in common English

But if you've studied linguistics, you know that shittons of very common English words are of French origin (people, place, city, forest, river, mountain, country, large, point, use, able, actual...etc)
It's actually very rare to see an English sentence, even basic, without French words in it.

The basic underpinnings of the language are Germanic. How we form words, structure sentences, etc. While there are a shitload of loanwords, English is still at its core Germanic.

>and shed many of its inflections *in part* (but not completely) due to heavy contact with other languages, not just French but Scandinavian and Brythonic
Explain further.

>There have been studies done on this by analyzing books, published papers, legal documents, etc. and most of the vernacular used is still Germanic.

Mentioned it there These percentages are flawed by the fact structure words are all Germanic
If you study only the words that give its sense to a sentence (adjectives/nouns/verbs), it's easily 50/50 between French and Germanic

>if you ignore these words that represent fundamental structure of a language, this language is totally a pigin

Just admit you're wrong

Proofs?

All the vowel clusters are undeniably french, idk about the rest though

What vowel clusters?

beautiful
language
people
mountain
country

Yeah, these are French originated words
What does it have to do with the grammar or syntaxe though?
Grammar is the only truly Germanic thing in English

see >idk abut the rest though
im pretty sure english grammar is still very germanic but i dont know germanic grammar very well so i cant say

What does this have to do with phonology? They aren't pronounced as vowel clusters or anything like in French.

afaik they originally were in middle english but they moved away after a while
tower and flower were originally pronounced like tour and fleur

Just because it borrowed vocabulary? Every language on earth does that.

English doesnt even pronounce its French words like the French do btw
Stuff ending in "tre" (centre, number, sabre, metre..) are pronunce as "ter" (like the American spell them) instead of "tr" like in French.
Very similarly to how English pronounce words ending in "tle" (little, turtle...) as "tul" instead "tluh/tlay"

Not on the same scale as English language did though

represented long /uː/ in Middle English, a native sound, which became /au/ after the Great Vowel shift. The only thing French about it is the orthography.

Notice how thanks to the Normans Anglo origin words sound downright plebeian compared to their Frog aristocratic counterparts.

Kingly vs Royal
Rise vs Ascend
Wish vs Desire
Smell vs Odour
Room vs Chamber
Eat vs Dine
Ask vs Demand

maybe i used the wrong terminology or something (i dont know a whole lot of lingustics)

Sorry this took a min, got called away on life stuff. By the time of the Norman invasions, English was already in the process of becoming more analytic, simplifying its case systems and consequently developing more a rigid word order -- in short, becoming more syntactically complex but less morphologically complex.

This process probably wasn't CAUSED by the Norman conquest (or by contact with the Norse settlers who preceded them) -- after all, most Scandinavian languages underwent a similar process, and they weren't subject to the same outside pressures as English -- but it might have accelerated it (As for why English and the Scandinavian languages were undergoing this process, or what causes any language to develop the way it does, that's anybody's guess, although there's plenty of hypotheses out there.)

English speakers had a lot of contact with foreign speakers, there were a lot of Norse/French/Celtic speakers who had to learn English, and although those languages weren't necessarily much less inflected than English, they were inflected in different ways. There was a paper linked here just a couple weeks ago talking about Brythonic influence on English, for instance -- languages in the Brythonic family didn't have much in the way of case endings, whereas OE was all about case endings, leading to a tendency for native Brythonic learners of English to simplify and sometimes drop the inflectional endings for nouns and rely on word order to mark a word's function in the sentence. Which is a self-reinforcing process, as once a language starts to develop rigid word order, having a zillion different declensions etc becomes superfluous, leading to a further tendency drop the case endings, and so on and so on (a process you can see with native Esperanto speakers, of which there are a couple thousand -- they tend to ignore the largely superfluous accusative and rely on word order).

Hope that wasn't confusing.